perdition
by madelinear
Summary: I never meant for this to happen."
1. 1

**Title**: perdition  
  
**Author**: Sugar Princess, a.k.a Sunny Daze  
  
**Disclaimer**: I don't own Alias or the characters therein, I'm just borrowing them.  
**  
Summary**: Post "The Telling"- an alternate approach to what could've happened.  
  
**A/N**: This fic would not have been possible without my dear friends Monica, Hannah and Tess. Without their support and awesome beta-skills, this would still be rattling around in my head. Thanks, guys.

It also would've never made it to ff.n without the prodding of my darling Nita.  
  
Enjoy!

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**perdition.**

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Fury said to a mouse, That he met in the house,

"Let us both go to the law. I will prosecute you.

---Come I'll take no denial; We must have a trial:

For really this morning I've nothing to do."

Said the mouse to the cur, "Such a trial, dear Sir,

With no jury or judge, would be wasting our breath."

"I'll be the judge, I'll be the jury," Said the cunning old Fury.

"I'll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death."

-_The Mouse's Tail_, Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

1

She had the maddening habit of being completely aloof, and she could lie on the couch reading, completely oblivious to his obvious disquiet until she chose to address his problems.

"This," he says, "It doesn't work." He doesn't say 'anymore' because it might never have worked to begin with.

She deigns to look at him over her book- a biography, which is all she ever reads now. She has no interest in fantasy any more. She wants facts, life stories behind people she admires or thought beautiful once.

"It doesn't?" she asks, and she has the gall to look surprised and he loathes it, because she's taken on the air of a deposed princess or a belle in exile- condescending, haughty.

"No. We've changed. We're not who we were," and he trips over this simple word- "before."

She doesn't ask the obvious question- before what?- and instead marks her page carefully, sitting up to cock her head, bewildered. "We didn't change, dear. Oh no. People changed, our lives changed- but we're the same. We're us."

He laughs bitterly. "Frankenstein's creation, he can say that. But we're not science experiments; we're not monsters, either. Not always."

She snorts. "You say that with such conviction."

"Look at history, and you'll see."

"We did nothing others wouldn't have done in our situation." she says firmly, smoothing her skirt over her knees. She's barefoot, as she always is around the house, and her toenails are painted candy apple red, and he knows where she bought the nail polish and when she painted her nails and where, and it sickens him.

"We were insane."

"We thought we were dreaming."

"You said we were. I went along with it."

"You didn't need to."

"I had no choice."

"This isn't my fault, don't blame me for everything."

He grits his teeth, sharpening his response in his mind before slashing. "Of course not, you're legally dead. You can't be held accountable for anything."

And this is when he loses himself.

He had entered the dream unwittingly six months ago, and he had spent two minutes outside the door trying to steady his breath before diving back underwater.

He had been treading water for two years now, and he was skilled at it. This might be a false alarm, so he was taking a deep breath in case he was submerged by an unexpected wave of emotion.

And then he opened the door to find himself in Munchkin Land.

It was Munchkin Land in the sense that, like Dorothy, he walked from sepia into vivid color, into palpable life and vitality, and this was all because she was crouched in a corner.

She was hiding in the corner of the room when he arrived, pretending that she wasn't there, attempting to wake herself up from this trippy dream. It was funny, she didn't _remember _drinking, but something had brought this on, and while she had an impressive imagination, this was way out of her league. Dragons and princes and castles, yes; alleys and scars and stale safehouses, no.

She had once been good at math, but the numbers weren't helping her now. She was using them as a distraction- how long did it take a plane to get to China from California?- so that she would not wonder why she was in China and why there was an ugly scar just above the ridge of her hip.

Fifteen hours. It took a non-stop flight fifteen hours, and he had made it in sixteen.

He entered like a man asleep, trudging his way heavily through reality. She raised her head from her knees, not sure who she was expecting, but too tired to start out fighting. She had succumbed to the idea that she is in a CIA safehouse and that she is tired and that she aches, and she is confused and too wound up to rest.

When she looked up, looking years younger than she was, and he peered into her face, she felt the need to release a gasp and launched herself into his arms, kissing his neck with fervor. He marveled that if this wasn't the real Sydney Bristow that she was a remarkable double, because this one even smelled like her, underneath the smell of cheap detergent and generic shampoo, and under the horrible animal scent of fear, it was her, as fresh and as sweet as he remembered.

He had felt very old when he had gently pried her off to examine her closely- the same latent freckles hardly visible to the naked eye, same dimples, same pattern of the iris. As he searched her face, she drank him in, because she had missed him in some way that she couldn't explain or identify. She took in the new creases and wrinkles that appeared there overnight, and she kindly attributed his haggard appearance to a long flight and worry. What she intended to do was make sure those wrinkles left his face soon and were replaced with smiles, because she had appointed herself to that position.

She didn't know what to say, so she said nothing at all, not even when he told her gruffly that she had better sit down. He had extracted himself from her embrace and was now sitting apart from her, and she knew then that something had broken, maybe the world, it's either that or the sky has fallen, and she resisted the urge to run to the window and check on the sky, just as she resisted the urge to sit on his lap and pat him to assure herself of his reality, because she had missed him, she just didn't know why.

He said things that were so insane that they must be true, because he had a limited imagination and what he said was so fantastic that it could only be reality or some incredibly realistic dream. It was after he'd finished that she saw the glinting symbol of her mortality on his finger, and something inside her snapped, and she swallowed harshly before clamping her hands around her knees and asking him, carefully and concisely in fewer than five words, to explain this new accessory.

It wasn't until he was half-way through his stumbling explanation that she started to cry softly, thinking about how he would have it all, the white picket fence and the tire swings and the minivans and the lazy Sunday mornings and china sets. He stopped talking to watch her wallow in her sorrow and sadistic imaginings before he stretched across the chasm of the past to grip her arm, painfully, with the untainted hand, the right hand, the hand that hadn't betrayed her.

Her breath shuddered to a stop, and he could feel her pulse through his hand, as though he was taking her in by osmosis, and just before he started to remind her to breathe, she whispered insistently that she couldn't remember, not anything, not being gone, but she had missed him, she knew that, because she could feel it. She didn't look at him while she said this, choosing instead to look at his hand on her arm, his hold on her arm palpable and real in what was obviously a dream world. Slowly, he released her, and he sat back in his chair, a chill noticeably shaking both his frame and his composure. Sydney, he said, his voice rusty as though he had hardly spoken while she was gone, while he was living underwater, not a day has gone by where I haven't missed you.

And this she doubted, because one does not get a ring on one's finger by missing someone, but he clarifies. It was _her_ fault that he'd married, he'd missed her, he couldn't live without her, he'd needed someone to replace her, but she didn't, no one could. She accepted the guilt and then asked him steadily what, exactly, he planned on doing.

He was quiet for too long.

This is a dream, she announced, this isn't real. In your dream I've been dead for two years, and in my dream I'm waking up after being gone for two years, but when we wake up, everything will be fine. We can do as we please.

He said her name, weighing both syllables heavily because he had missed saying it, and because what she was saying was insane. He was beginning to shake his head and protest when she caught his eye and said simply that she had missed him and that she would fight for him.

And he didn't have it in him to deny her.

Or himself.

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There are several more parts to this- love it? Hate it? Please, drop me a line.  
  
Thank you for reading!


	2. 2

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Author's note**: Thanks for the lovely reviews! 

**perdition.**

2

It had rained the night before, a brutal rain that had abused the land, and now the air

smells poisonous with the sickly sweet smell of rotting gardenias. The scent verged on violent when they flourished; as they lay dying on the ground, it was nauseating. It permeated their apartment, leaking in through the windows, creeping insidiously with breezes, wafting powerfully in the gentle circulation of the fans.

The storm had left a heavy cloud of humidity and a power outage. She was not singing as she went about the house trying to keep cool, and when she lay down in bed beside him, she made sure to keep space between them, dropping the ice into his palm.

"If I never smell a gardenia for the rest of my life, I will be happy," she says as she chokes on her breath. From the glass she brought in he takes an ice cube and slides it into her mouth, letting his fingers linger on her lips.

They had argued earlier, as they did often now, but after a dinner of clanking silverware and heavy silence, the storm had roared forth, the thunder and lightning so severe that he broke the silence to warn her to stay away from the windows. He had gone to locate a flashlight while she started on the dishes when the power had gone out, plunging them into a deep darkness that was made worse by the torrential rain outside. She turned to call for him, and she knocked into a glass, sending it crashing to the floor where it shattered. Panicked and barefoot, she had called for him to save her. She had used his name for the first time in weeks.

Armed with a flashlight he had rescued her from her fate, carrying her to the living room and depositing her on the couch without a word. And then he had turned and walked away, leaving her sitting on the sofa in the dark, unusually frightened by the dark and of the thunder.

She had curled up in a corner, her face, illuminated by the frequent flashes of lightning, a study of terror. Bearing an armful of candles and a book of matches he had come forth, and she frightened him. Quickly, quietly, not to startle, he'd forgotten the argument and what had once been anger, dropping the candles to be swallowed by the dark. He felt her clawing at the air to reach him, the lone flashlight illuminating the dust mites and monsters under the couch, and she grasped his hands roughly.

"They kept me in the dark," she had whimpered, a child plagued, "And I missed you, but there was nothing but the dark-" and he had comforted her the best he could, lighting candles so that she would not be afraid, taking her into his arms so that she would not be alone, and the rain had continued.

The demons had disappeared with the storm, and now they lay quietly on their lumpy mattress, sheets rumpled and shoved to the foot of the bed. She had slipped on cheap flip flops to go find them ice; they knew the paltry contents of their refrigerator would be gone by noon, and they had breakfasted on chocolate ice cream and popsicles, the gardenia warping the taste of both.

"Maybe we'll melt," she says suddenly, and her tone sounds as though she finds this thought appealing. "We'll melt and drip away into nothing."

He knows they live in some sort of alternate reality, but he is not willing to admit it.

They die in every city.

The first casualties are their names, the second, their identities.

She is Susie, Megan, April, Natalie, Mandy, with every new name, she adopts their own habits and loses her own. Susie scratches her elbow when she's anxious, Megan wears sandals on Thursdays without fail, April believes that Tuesdays are cursed, Natalie must wear a bangle on her left wrist, Mandy rubs at her eyes when she's tired.

He is Joshua, Matthew, Jake, Alex, Patrick, and he keeps his habits and adapts to hers. She is a method actress, and he has trouble just staying in character. He knows that he is losing her one bit at a time but doesn't tell her that.

They walk in crowds with their hands clasped, more out of fear then affection, though they don't admit to it. They'll play the part of tourists, and she leads the lives she thinks her name should have, because her life is a short step after she lost a few years.

As April, she crosses paths with a gypsy and decides that if she doesn't get her fortune told, she will absolutely perish, and so she drags him (Jake) in to her tent. She is an older woman and a complete fake.

"Your mother- she was a housewife. You were her favorite, even though you had other siblings."

"Yes," April breathes, enraptured. He watches her lie and wonders if she believes her own words.

"Your father was- he was a teacher, yes, a teacher of math. He was very loving and attentive."

April laughs gaily- high, false. "Daddy was _so_ wonderful," she gushes, twirling a lock of short blonde hair around her finger.

"You weren't very good in school-" Here he nearly chokes, "But you tried hard and were very involved in sports. You had many friends."

April trills in amazement, "I wasn't voted prom queen for nothing!" Then she pauses, her hand stilling as she leans forward to whisper conspiratorially: "Tell me about my..." April glances over to where he stands, then back at the so-called gypsy, who nods knowingly. She motions for April to lay her hand palm-up on the table, where she studies the lines at length.

"You are not married, but you will be, soon. You will be extraordinarily happy, and you will have two children. It is very important that you make sure you place your older daughter in acting. She will be renowned for her great beauty one day."

April soaks this in, nodding seriously. "And the other one?"

"She will have the heart and the patience of unknown depths."

The gypsy coerces April into having her future seen in a crystal ball (large, lavish wedding; insanely luxurious life) and then all but demands that she buys a small rag doll to "bring her luck". The doll, which is the size of her hand, is purchased after being stuffed with dried herbs that will be beneficial to her life, says the gypsy. He feels that he now knows first hand the origin of the term "gypped."

"Can you believe that?" he asks lightly as they step back into the sunlight.

She stops abruptly, her rag doll clutched in her hand. "Believe what?"

"What she just said."

"She spoke the truth."

He peers into her face, hoping to find in April a trace of the woman he'd loved. "Don't do this," he almost begs, because it frightens him when she loses herself.

She blinks. "Do what?" She grins, her smile as blinding as the sunlight, and swings his hand, urging him forward. "You worry too much."

She avoids his name.

It isn't until darkness falls that he ever discusses anything serious. She's the talker, and she keeps conversations rolling; he is just as happy with silence. In the quiet, he does not have to confront the possibility of losing her, and of losing himself.

"What are you afraid of?"

"The truth. You?"

"Reality."

"And?"

"Losing you."

"You lose me everywhere we go. You know that."

"Never. I've never lost you."

"You will, though."

"I will not."

"Someday, you'll wake up, and we'll both be gone."

"Then we'll be gone together."

"That's not how it works."

"We'll make it work. We always do. And if you disappear, I'll find you."

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More, soon. And reviews are nice. ;-) 


	3. 3

**Author's note**: One of the reviews asked for an explanation for this fic- and it would really kind of ruin the point of the fic if I had to do it. If you're still lost by the end, feel free to contact me or leave a review asking questions and I'll answer them as best as I can.

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**perdition**

3

She comes back in the dark, and he'll wake up to find her sitting beside him, gazing at his face wistfully, and he'll know right away that it's _her_ and not one of her many aliases. He'll reach for her and she'll fall into his arms wordlessly, and he'll stroke her hair and kiss her face and he'll know then that he could never survive again without her, and if that means putting up with everyone else she brings with her, then so be it.

They make love on those nights, and she'll fall asleep nestled against him; but when he awakes the sheets will be smooth and she'll be awake and back to whom she was the day before, and it will be as if it never happened. This is her protection.

On one such morning he wakes up, hoping against hope that she'll still be there, but, as usual, she had fled.

She's Natalie now, Natalie after the actress, with brown hair and a flair for the dramatic, a bangle on her wrist, sipping tea as she glances at a newspaper written in a foreign language that she can barely decipher and that he has given up on.

He says her name low, and she pretends not to hear. Saying her alias burns his tongue and he spits it out quickly, nauseated when she whips her head around and beams. "Angel! What do you want for breakfast?"

"I can't take it anymore." he says, and his voice is quiet and hard, and a look of sheer terror flits over her features. He's not sure what he can't take, because he know that if he leaves he'll be back by the next afternoon (and hates himself for it) if he makes it out the door at all.

She feigns innocence. "Can't take what, precious?"

He yells in controlled rage, forever mindful of the neighbors and of those who mean her harm: "This, Sydney, this. I can't take _this_ anymore, the running and the hiding and the hair dye and the contacts and your jobs to finance it all. I haven't been able to hear English from anyone but you in _five months_. I'm homesick. I could bear it, Sydney, I'd be happy to be here if only you were the same, but you're not, and I can't do anything to draw you back. I've _lost_, Sydney- I lost you and I can't get you back, and I can't stand that you won't even be yourself for me any longer. I'm losing myself, and it scares me, because with both of us gone we'll never get home."

He wants her to yell at him for being a traitor, for giving up, to do anything but stand there with her eyes filled with tears and her lips parted to catch her breath. He wants her to accuse him of something, _anything_ so that he can get angry and maybe escape this madness, driven by fury to leave.

She does not get angry, nor does she incite him. Instead she moves across the room to him, pushing into him like a child, her face against his neck as she imprisons him with her arms. 'I can't do this without you,' she sniffles, and she murmurs her absolute devotion to him and how she would die if he left her. "I want to go home," she whimpers, and he maneuvers them over to the couch so that he can comfort her properly. "I'm not gone, Vaughn," she asserts, "I'm here, I've never left, and we'll go home, soon, I promise, but-"

Here she sits up straight, her arms still around his neck, her eyes glittering with tears, "But not yet, please? I have to find out who did this to me, to _us_, and then everything will be all right, and we'll go home."

He does not tell her that nothing will ever be all right, but she is smiling again. "We can go to town this afternoon." she plans, "and I'll make a call, and we can leave here. Maybe Morocco or Algeria. It'll be nice."

With every call she makes, they fall deeper, but he mumbles "All right," defeated. She moves away, ostensibly to make him something to eat, and he realizes that he has died again, in some small way or another.

Instructions she'll write out for him and then burn. Flight numbers, locations, numbers, logistics. They give her the bare bones of an operation: he plans it, she executes it. Memorizing, time of the essence: plan, commit to memory, light a match. Fear chills the air around them as they dye their hair over the kitchen sink, brown for him, auburn for her.

Cargo planes mostly, jets occasionally, sunglasses and hats used liberally. Once, back when it was a game, he'd commented that someone might mistake her for some movie star traveling incognito. They arrive in Milan, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, Prague and don't stay long enough to get jet-lagged. They break in, they download, they steal objects- everything they used to do, only now they can't hide behind the flag. They have the latest gear and their plans and contingencies down pat, but his breath still catches in his throat when he hears the sickening thud of bodies against walls (floors, doors, metal, concrete, wood, marble) or the spray of gunfire and the nauseating silence that follows when he can't tell if he can inhale again or if life is over.

She comes out alive, she always does, and through the comm he can hear the strains of a waltz that the band is playing downstairs at some upscale party that they'd never merit an invitation to even if they weren't frauds.

Their reward for surviving the mission was a handsome envelope stuffed with untraceable bills and the ability to live comfortably for several weeks- or like royalty for several days. They opt for seedy hotels and cramped apartments to prolong times between jobs, because they both know that they take a gamble every time they agree to one, risk calling attention to themselves, the lost, the rogues.

They perform their duties, eyes to the ceiling, and then they fly away to some distant city, where they never speak of what has just occurred. They recreate themselves- Stacy and Romain, and they live now in Algeria. She makes up the story, which she informs him of with heavily-lidded eyes: she is a college student and he is her professor, and they've run away to live some quixotic adventure of mad romance. This will work because she looks appropriately young and he looks appropriately guilty. She had chosen Algiers because it was once French and she wants to offer him comfort where she can. He appreciates the effort.

They live in the slums of the city, the area considered unsafe for tourists. Every day he risks the danger of going down to the port and gazing longingly at the ferry that goes to Marseilles before trudging back to their little apartment. She is happy there for some reason, enjoying, as always, the dry heat. They are safe there, because people are warned to stay away from this area of the world unless absolutely necessary. She enjoys the ancient ruins not to far from the city, the streets that zigzag and the architecture that mixes European styles with Arabic. She plans trips to the picturesque areas surrounding them, to the art museum, and he wonders if she's just trying to pretend they're on a vacation. In the mornings, copies of the major French newspaper rest on the table and he hates to admit that it is comforting to be confronted with familiarity. She even manages to find a theatre that shows French and English films that she surprises him with, excited as he imagined she would be on Christmas morning.

Their first film there is _The Wizard of Oz_, which she claims was her favorite movie as a child, and that she would wait all year for them to show it on television, but she always cried when Dorothy went back to living in sepia-tinted Kansas. She preferred the bright colors of Oz.

Neither of them has seen the movie in years, and they sat close to the screen in a practically empty theatre, their arms entwined on the armrest between them, hands clasped loosely. She lets her head fall to his shoulder when Dorothy begins singing _Somewhere over the Rainbow_ and it isn't long before he realizes that she is crying. He says nothing, knowing that there was nothing to be said, and that their both wishing for somewhere where there isn't any trouble is a pipe dream and nothing more, and the movement of her face as she mouths the lyrics is a sad testimony to the state of things.

It isn't until later, much later, when they're lying in bed and she's asleep with her lips parted and her ankle over his, that he realizes that she is Dorothy, the little girl dreamer thrown into chaotic worlds by forces she had no control over, longing for the normalcy promised to all children.

One day she sees her father in a crowd and drops his hand for the first time to follow him, disappearing into dank alleyways, crying out for him silently. He follows her, his heart skipping beats when he loses sight of her. She stops abruptly at the crossroads of two alleys, slumping into a wall, hiding her face behind a hank of red hair.

He puts his hand on her shoulder, and she reaches up to curl her fingers around him without turning. "I want to go home," she whispers. "I want to go home."

They pass the American embassy on their way back to their apartment. They try their best not to stare at it greedily.

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Reviews are food for the soul.


	4. 4

Hey, guys, here's a new chapter. Enjoy!

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4 

The women of the building love Stacy. They love her tenseless, flawed French and her hesitant, stumbling show of Arabic. They love the way she wears long sleeves to fit in with their culture and how she clutches the ends of those sleeves with child-like dependence. They love her cinnamon-colored hair that waves slightly and the dusking of freckles across her pale skin. They love her effervescence and the way she waves to them in the hallway and knows all their childrens' names, even if she can hardly converse with them. They love the way she tries. They love the way she comes to them for help. They love Stacy, full stop.

It's him they don't like. They think he is moody and snobbish, with his French papers and clipped words. His French is perfect and his Arabic is horrific. His hair is too dark for his features, they think, and they don't trust his green eyes that cloud over and shift and dart as though nervous, even when talking to the old women. He is always polite, but they don't like him. He has brought this sheltered, treasured darling to a world that they know is dangerous. They don't feel he takes care of her.

They wonder what they do all day, because one rarely goes out without the other attached to his hand. They have torrid ideas of what might be going on, but they cannot reconcile it with the sweet-faced girl they see and the lack of noise inevitable with the paper-thin walls.

He wants to like them, more than he wants them to like him, because she likes them. He cannot bring himself to, and it's more than just spite. He doesn't like them because they send her home limp and dry, sucking out her spirit through her act. She spoils her phrases before speaking, always a few steps ahead. She creates backstories needed and gets flustered when she feels Stacy would or when she feels that they would expect her to. He fears that she will turn bone-dry like they are, and when she comes home wearily and sifts back into his life he wonders if the desert conquers people little by little or all at once.

They both miss the common things that made them who they were: him, his hockey games and his aftershave and his ability to believe in happy endings; her, her long baths and her strawberry lip gloss and her unbridled enthusiasm for life. She has him wish on eyelashes with her and she avoids cracks in sidewalks studiously.

She is unusually animated when they go to visit the Roman ruins of Djemila. She is thrilled with the palpable history and the preserved slice of antiquity. "Just think," she says in awe, "someone stood here, right here, over two thousand years ago, and they saw what I see now. Isn't that nice? That it hasn't changed? And maybe years from now someone else will stand right here and they'll look out and see the same thing." She misses the stability of a history in her life, and she is vicariously happy for those who have it. She spends hours in the museum, fascinated by the world-renowned mosaics and the marble statues, but also captivated by the ordinary household items on display.

On their way back to Algiers they pass through Setif, where an oddly placed amusement park lays as though lost. It boasts a zoo that she insists on seeing and trudges sullenly throughout. He tries to engage her interest as they're leaving, fearful that she might've left something of herself to history back in Djemila, by asking her what her favorite animal was. She looks at him as though he were a simpleton. "The giraffe with a crooked neck, of course."

That he misses her while his fingers are wrapped around her wrist frightens him. He slides his arm around her waist, hoping to draw her closer to him, because he is afraid of the responsibility she piles onto him when she loses herself.

They go home, and the women smile sweetly at her and glare at him with barely concealed dislike. When she wafts up the stairs ahead of him, his breath catches in his throat because he is sure that he can see through her.

He can count the knobs of her spine through the shirt she wears to bed when he wakes up one dark morning. She is sitting with her knees drawn to her chest, arms loosely embracing them. He stretches an arm towards her, his limbs heavy from sleep, and splays his fingers over her back.

"I dreamt last night." she says quietly, not to him, but just aloud. She does not wait for him to respond before continuing. "I dreamt that I was six again, and my mother had just died. My father wasn't home and I was very lonely... and I knew, somehow, that my mother was bad. I didn't know she was alive, but I knew she had done something horrible, and I was going around in a world where the sky had fallen... and it was the day before my birthday, and I was sitting on the steps in front of school waiting to be picked up, my nanny was late again- when my mother pulled up and rolled down the window, and it was so _normal_- and she called for me.

"And I knew she was bad. I knew she was bad and she had left me and that I should be mad at her- but I was so _relieved_- my mother, alive, and wanting to be with _me_- that I didn't even hesitate before running over and getting into the car with her. And she offered me her cheek to kiss, and she kissed me and smelled the same, and she smoothed my hair and complained about the hole in my tights from playing rough during recess and it was so wonderfully normal that I even thought to myself, I don't care if Mommy's bad, she loves me.

"We drove for a long time, and I knew that my nanny would be worried, but I didn't care, and finally we got to this hotel, and she signed in under a different name and she took me to her room and she had bought me toys and new clothes and books... she was trying to buy me off... and all the while I was thinking how wrong it was, but then she'd turn and smile at me, or she'd hold my hand, or she'd kiss me... and I would make excuses for her in my head. Even when she was doing strange things, or being moody, I'd think, she'll come back, and she'll be Mommy again... and I kept waiting for it."

She is cool under his fingers, cool and smooth as he slides his hand under the tank to feel the silk of her flesh, warming her with his love and good intentions. He can feel her words through her as though this dream has come from deep inside her and he can absorb it. Her shoulders hitch as her breathing snags on her emotions and she turns to look at him, her eyes burning with tears.

"How could I go? Why would I love her so much to follow her even when I knew what I was getting into? Why would I make excuses for her, allowances for her, all because she had loved me once? I loved her so much that I was willing to do anything to please her, just to keep her with me... but why? Why wasn't I stronger than that? How could I be so weak?"

He comforts her wordlessly, stunned into silence as he strokes her hair and taps soothing rhythms onto her back.

He does not need to watch her to know what she looks like as she speaks to her contact on the phone. He can envision her stumbling pronunciation of difficult languages, the pleading face that's futile, her debating tone. She'll hold the phone with her right as she demonstrates with her left hand, speaking softly enough so as not to gain an audience to herself but with enough vigor to earn attention.

He lets her bargain while he gazes across the Mediterranean, and is vaguely frightened with how little he cares. She can't find them something to do? So what? So they'll move somewhere banal, somewhere when they'll "never be found"- quotation marks necessary- and hide out until inevitably one or both of them gets the jitters and leaves. That which they considered normal was so jarringly bizarre that they had no point of reference any longer- they could get normal, mindless jobs belonging to drones. They could fake their identities, fake a marriage, fake affection, fake normalcy.

Maybe one day one would leave without the other and that would be that.

He's trying to recall the distance from where he was standing to French territory when she wraps her arms around him and leans her head against his back. He automatically places a hand over hers, and there is only a small twinge of love? lust? when she laces her fingers through his. He wants to either not care and be done with it or care fully and be able to commit in the small ways they're able to. This inertia with his emotion tempered by his guilt at it was not a healthy mix.

She's moving her lips against his shoulder blades as she speaks, and her breath scorches his skin. "This mission's a bit different."

He feigns interest. She doesn't notice. "How so?"

"Oh, they say it's a solo mission. And they have everything specced out, which is unusual."

Oh, she's lighthearted today, he thinks, and there's a frisson of a chill when he realizes that he does care, deeply and truly, and he hates his undecided emotions.

"We're flying to Norway tonight," she informs him. "Spending the night there, and then we're going to London. They're being very specific. It's semi-long term. They're going to fill me in when we get there- is everything all right?"

Returning to civilization for more than a brief respite. How generous she was being.

How dangerous.

She wants him to turn. He can feel this by the way she impatiently tugs and wrinkles his shirt, subversive enough so that he can't call her on it, unmistakable enough so that he knows what's expected of him. Unintended deviousness. Damn her.

"What's in Norway?" he asks dimly, still not turning to face her.

"Papers and gear. Plane leaves in an hour."

They leave without saying goodbye.

* * *

Clicking purple buttons is a nice practice. 


	5. 5

5

Finding in a folder not only an entire identity for herself, but one for him as well, is a dream come true for her. They're real people now, with credit histories and degrees and families (dead now, but they "existed" at some point or another.) He is a random skid. She has a purpose. She once existed.

She shrugs noncommittally as she memorizes the address of her personality's London flat. "She used to work for them," and she does not say who they are. "And now she's under their," another they, he doesn't care, "control, but she supposedly has all sorts of intel hidden all over. I am a dead ringer for her, too."

Honey-colored locks that swing in the sunlight and flip at the tips, her expression hidden by designer shades. She is exquisite, walks as though she has not a care in the world, head held high. For a moment, he has her back.

The jet from Norway to London takes just over two hours to deliver them safely. She saunters through the terminal as though she owns it, hair bouncing, tossing dazzling smiles at hapless passersby who know not the power she possesses. Their luggage- several suitcases that they had not checked in themselves, all Louis Vuitton and identified as belonging to them in their respective handwriting- are lovingly handled by porters tripping over themselves to help the pretty young woman with a luminous quality. She steps to the curb and raises a graceful hand that sends five cabs screeching to a halt. It's eerie.

They are quiet on their way to the penthouse in the West End of London they've never seen, but the doorman is obviously thrilled to see her, handling the luggage as the caramelized woman glides through the opulent lobby to a bank of elevators. He trails behind her, noting how in this incarnation she walks the same as Sydney.

To call the penthouse luxurious would be an understatement. The very walls whisper of class and elegance and she was delighted. This is the kind of home she'd grown up in, he can recall, because she grew up in a big house with maids and nannies and it was the kind of place where one put something back the minute one stopped using it (something he'd never been able to master: not in the home, because his mother wasn't that manic; not in his personal life, because he could never leave well enough alone).

She flits from one room to the next. Gorgeous heavy furniture in the living room; ornate dining room; modern kitchen; Grecian bathrooms; fantastic bedrooms. The closet is full of couture and walk-in and is so organized he wonders what kind of life, exactly, the woman that she's supposed to be led.

In the bedroom is a jewelry box, and in it are dozens of trinkets- Tiffany's and Cartier and Piaget and Harry Winston and Rolex and a thin silver chain with a large diamond "J" dangling from it. She fingers it absently.

It's six days before Christmas, he realizes, and she drops the necklace back into the box goes into the kitchen to search for something to eat because the continental breakfast they offered on the plane wasn't palatable to her majesty's discerning taste. While she's searching the cupboards and refrigerator, he notices that the woman who lived here has no personal decorations at all- just photographs and paintings of landscapes and, how fascinating she is, this mystery woman, this Julia Thorne that she is pretending to be.

She calls out that there's nothing in the kitchen and that they're going to need to go to get some food, does he want to come with her? Certainly. They go downstairs and one of the doormen run to go and fetch her car- a steel grey Jaguar- and they make a lovely couple.

The market they wind up at is small and overpriced with expensive items the woman he loved would've laughed at. Instead she buys prosciutto and San Pellegrino water without batting an eye. "Lobster for dinner?" she asks casually, and he wonders if she realizes that neither of them can cook.

She eschews the lobster idea in favor of handmade pasta and bottled sauce, which is within the realm of reality since they can both boil water. He has a limited concept of pounds, but when they check out he's left with the unsettling feeling that they've spent too much.

Even more disconcerting is how she signs her name with her left hand.

"When did you become ambidextrous?" he asks casually on their way home as she drives on the wrong side of the street with ease. She handles the stick shift with her left hand effortlessly.

She doesn't look at him. "Hm?" she asks distractedly, so he repeats, with infinite patience, "When did you become ambidextrous?"

"What?" she looks at her hands on the steering wheel. She shrugs, her nose wrinkling.

"You signed the check with your left hand in the store."

She pauses before nodding. "Yes. I did."

"Why?"

She shakes her head slowly. "I don't know."

She turns on the radio after a few seconds of silence.

There are a few days of grace for the holidays that she forgets about until the last minute. Christmas in London, once she remembers it, excites her, and she drags him along to shop and soak in the atmosphere.

Four days before Christmas is crisp and clean and they walk down the snowy streets and promise they'll only buy each other one gift when they separate at Harrods. It is the first time they have separated willingly since they found one another again (a euphemism he uses, squashing all other explanations in his mind) and he takes his time. He meanders around the six levels of the famous department store, ignoring the jewelry counters (she's got plenty, he reasons) and the clothes (he has seen her closet). He winds up in the book department.

He wonders what he would've bought for Sydney under normal circumstances.

The book department, he knows, is a good place to find a gift for someone who has a degree in English. He scans titles, realizing he doesn't even know what kinds of books she likes to read. Romances? Historic fiction? Mysteries? He's sure she's read all of the classics.

He doesn't believe in biographies.

He finds himself in the children's section. He trails his fingers over the spines of the books slowly before arriving at a colorful one with a well-known title.

Yes, this is what he will buy her.

After he purchased _The Wizard of Oz_ using his brand-new checking account, he proceeds to the designated rendezvous point and waits for her to come back. He's slowly becoming used to her as a blonde- he adapts quickly now- and he muses wryly to himself that now she's what he used to consider his type and he misses her long brown hair more than anything.

He cannot help peering through the crowds searching for her tall, immaculately clad form striding forward as though with a purpose. He hopes her new unlimited cash resource hasn't gone to her head and that her gift for him is reasonable- and he might have to injure her if she shows up with a bag marked "Rolex" somewhere. He is wondering just _how_ he could hurt her when she shows up, her eyes watering and he is hit with the full force of just how delicate Sydney Bristow really is.

She doesn't want to be comforted, whatever had happened, and she pastes on a brave smile and grips at his hand. "Home?" she says tremulously, and he agrees wordlessly, hoping she will explain.

"Damn song," she says in the car, wiping at her eyes as he drives. "I always hated it- but then they played it in the store- _God_. I broke down crying looking at gloves. I was holding a pair of black gloves and crying. It was absolutely pathetic."

In a spurt of courage he asks, "What song?"

"'Have yourself a merry little Christmas'. All I could think was- we'll never get it back, will we? Next year we aren't going to be home, and the next, and the next. We're making it through- but we're not going home, we aren't going to be able to spend Christmas with them."

They don't usually speak of this. They make a point of not speaking about this.

"No," he says simply, not looking at her. "We're not."

She turns in her seat to face him, leaning her head back, her hand extended to rest on his knee. "But we'll be together, won't we?"

He doesn't make promises he can't keep. He tries not to, anyway.

He squeezes her hand in response.

He finds he cannot sleep in the cloud that Julia Thorne must once have called her bed. The feather mattress is just too much. He doesn't complain, however, and lies there next to her, listening to her even breathing.

She wants to call her father. She mentioned it on the way home after the musical fiasco, how she would do anything just to call him and hear him answer the phone with his gruff bark of their last name.

He can relate to that. He wonders about his mother now in the darkness, wondering what she's been told. He wonders if they told her that he was dead, that another man of her life had been lost to duty, or if they told her the truth: your son was crazy in love and ran off without a second thought to anyone else. Your son doesn't love you enough to call you or make sure that you have someone to look after you.

He comforts himself by listening to her breathe. Even, calming, steady. She's facing away from him, sprawled on her stomach, the skin of her back gleaming in moonlight from where it peeks out from under the comforter. She had pulled her hair back into a messy ponytail, strands of sunlight streaming over the pillow. Just as he has matched his breathing to hers, she sighs and then it stops.

And she has left him again.

He has never been more certain of anything in his life. She has died again, and now he was alone, living in this palace of insane wealth that belongs to some woman he doesn't even know. She is gone again.

He reaches out to touch her, and he realizes his hand is shaking. Smooth skin beneath his fingertips, warm with fleeting life.

"Syd," he says hoarsely to Julia's body. "Syd."

A grunt, and she turns to face him. "Vaughn?" she mumbles, and it is Sydney's eyes he sees. She snaps into wakefulness. "Are you all right?" Her eyes, the eyes that haven't changed yet, search him for injury. When she finds none, she wordlessly opens her arms and embraces him to her, smelling like she always has, comforting and alive.

No. He's not all right.

She is not gone.

* * *

The purple button doesn't bite. Honest.


	6. 6

6

There is a crucifix over the bed (an apt position if there ever was one, she remarks) and a rosary in the night stand, a small silver cross over the dining room window and a larger one over the front door.

This was comforting to him, as he grew up in a Catholic household with crosses over all the doors and one around his neck. Growing up in a secular house, she is less prepared. The crucifix she associates (appropriately) with sacrifice and she shudders at it. He decides not to describe the crucifix he saw weekly in his church growing up to her.

Christmas Eve they go to a midnight mass (vigil, he says) at a church nearby. It is the first year he has gone without his mother. It is the first year she has gone.

The Catholic service is an hour long and familiar to him, and she catches on quickly, sometimes surprising him by being able to respond at the same time. She looks exquisite in a crimson sweater and leather jacket and boots and her cheeks are flushed from the cold. He can remember white Christmases from the few he spent back East growing up and the few he spent in France, but she is praying for her first.

Her eyes shine in the candlelight of the church and she leaves the mass exhilarated, thrilled with the tradition and sanctity of it all. She links arms with him and presses into his side, her breath making little clouds, one gloved- hand expressing herself as she breaks her silence to gush about how she's never done anything like that before.

On their way to the car, she slows down, pressing her fingers into his arm, scanning the sky. "It'd be nice," she says, playing with the long cashmere scarf that he wrapped around her neck twice before they left, "if we could all be led in the right direction by some star, wouldn't it? Like they were? Of course, you'd have to be observant and then you'd have to hope that you got there before sunrise- but it's a nice thought."

He opens the car door for her and closes it once she's pulled legs in, walking around to enter. When she's like that, with her innocent questions and pawing for attention, there is no definition between who she is and who she was and who she will be. He likes that.

Once home, he starts a fire in the fireplace and they curl up on the sofa, the stereo in the next room on playing Christmas music on the radio, and they're enveloped in gold. Christmas as a child for her, he knows, was never the thrilling event it was for him, and they are both quiet as they contemplate the lack of stockings hanging from the mantel, of a Christmas tree, of piles of presents. He misses his mother's gateau de Noël and wonders what those he's left behind are doing for Christmas.

She says his name quietly, her head against his neck, her fingers entwined with his. "Yes?" he replies.

"What do you think she's doing right now?"

He is momentarily stunned, wondering how she has read his mind. Knowing that she is many things, but clairvoyant is not one of them, he asks, "Who?"

"Your wife."

The word hangs heavily in the air, and he feels a chill stab him at the base of his skull and skitter down his spine, stretching along his limbs and ending at his fingers, which feel foreign and alien with hers. He has all but forgotten his ring banished to the lining of his wallet. The image of his wife's face is slightly hazy now, and he finds he cannot recall the sensation of her touch, or the exact locations of creases and birthmarks. He is well aware of how different that is from the way he could chart Sydney's body, even two years after her death. Guilt lodges itself in his stomach, and he cannot understand what would've possessed her to bring it up.

He had thought that his half-life during her absence was off-limits, like their various aliases and homes and their flights and their friends and everything unrelated to the present was.

She brings a hand to his cheek and murmurs his name again, her eyes all liquid with anxious sympathy.

Thankfully, on the radio, 'Have yourself a merry little Christmas' starts, and her face screws up and before the water works start he bounds into the other room to turn off the radio. When he returns, she has valiantly rid herself of tears and is staring into the fire.

"You know," he says, "Santa will never come if you don't go to sleep."

She smiles shortly and offers him her hand to pull her up, and when she stands she wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him. She doesn't tell him that she loves him, because that would be trite. Instead, she nuzzles herself against him and allows herself to be tucked into bed. When he crawls into next to her, she whispers "Merry Christmas" and snuggles into him and he realizes that they can live in limbo indefinitely.

New Years Eve is quiet for them. She buys them a bottle of champagne and they make a fire in the fire place and they put the TV on in the other room and listen to the merriment of the crowd. At midnight, while the television broadcasts Big Ben chiming, they step out on their snow-covered balcony to listen to the peals reverberating in the crisp winter air.

She turns to him, the apples of her cheeks flushed and pink and her eyes sparkling, and for a moment he can forget that the hair that whips around them both is honey-colored and not brown and she presses against him and kisses him. "Happy New Year," she whispers, and it is, for a little while.

They do not offer each other resolutions. Later, in bed, with his arm around her neck and her fingers linked with his she'll kiss his fingertips and tell him mundane things- she wants to go to Scotland, maybe Ireland; she wants to reread _Anne of Green Gables_; she wants to send her father a birthday card (March 16th, he doesn't try to figure out how she'll work it out); she's going to get a hair cut next Thursday and she's thinking of scheduling a manicure.

And he will pretend, just for now, that things are not horribly strange and dangerous, and that he has something to occupy his days and that he doesn't have an entirely separate life somewhere back West and that they are married and normal.

She mutters suddenly that she's starving and going to get the carton of ice cream they'd opened earlier. She disentangles herself from him and crosses the room without barking her shin once, her hand finding its way to the light-switch effortlessly.

"It's amazing," he says, "you memorize places like you do everything. I still run into things and I've got bruises from when I've walked into things in the dark- but you, it's like you've been here forever."

She turns around sharply, her face pale and eyes large as she faces him, deer in the headlight. "What?" she asks harshly.

He remarks that she seems at home here, bewildered by this reaction. She forcibly relaxes her stance and a strained smile graces her face. "You want anything?" (She slides away from what bothers her) and he shakes his head and decides not to wait up. She turns off the light and makes her way to the kitchen without incident.

That night, she has three nightmares, and after the third, which wakes her up at four in the morning, she stays awake, sitting beside him, stroking his hair. He wakes occasionally, taking in the comfort of the caress before asking thickly, what is it? Her tone is poignant as she exhales and reassures him that it's nothing, and he doesn't bother to argue. He moves closer to her as he drifts to sleep. He loves her too much not to.

* * *

Authors are needy things that crave feedback. I will love you forever if you do.


	7. 7

7

In the morning she has smudges under her eyes and she's unusually quiet, but he cannot bring himself to ask and hear her lies and accept them, so he stays silent, too.

She finds a package outside the door around noon- there is no postal service that day. They scan it as best as they can without the proper materials and then they bite the bullet and open it, wincing before realizing that it wasn't some sort of explosive and, even better, "It's not a body part."

Instead, there are car keys. Car keys that belong to a very expensive car. And ownership papers in his alias's name.

It's them, he knows it. She looks pleased.

No one has ever tried to buy him off. He feels sick. And cheap. And she is beaming at him. "How nice!" she exclaims, clapping her hands together.

He stares at her in disbelief. "Who are you?" he spits out, dropping the keys on the table and stalking out of the room She doesn't follow him and he can picture her face perfectly- stunned horror, sitting back, mouth ajar, her fingers brushing her jaw. She will blink rapidly a few times and remember who she is and inhale sharply, erasing all evidence of displeasure. He stalks into their room and realizes that he has no haven. This house belongs to someone else, and, by extension, her. He has no where else to go. Trapped. And now the serial killer comes in and hacks him into tiny pieces, wraps him up in paper lunch bags and deposits him in various garbage bins around the town, missions written on the side and phone calls with their bins' numbers at the end, Jack the  
Ripper style. No one would notice he was dead because he might be dead anyway. Dead and in possession of a really nice car. A really nice car whose purpose was expressly to buy him off and keep him quiet so that he didn't interfere with their asset's work. He's hardly in position to refuse it, but he wonders when he valued himself so poorly that he could be bought for the price of a really expensive nice car. He was born and raised a Catholic and imbued with the fear of God, the devil and hell. By accepting the car he was selling his soul. He is too far gone, anyway. What does it matter anymore? Nothing will save him from hell's fires at this late point, no matter how many masses his mother attended or candles she lit or rosaries she said. She calls into the bedroom that she's going out, and doesn't offer more than that and leaves, her heels clicking determinedly across the parquet hallway and hesitating by the door, waiting to see if he'll say something. "Goodbye!" she tries valiantly. 

He'll let her suffer. She can handle it.

* * *

Irritable: "Can you stop that?" Caught off guard: "What?" 

"The staring. It's annoying." Long exhale. Digusted.

"Staring?" Blankly. Not seeing anything. "Yeah. Like you expect something." "What are you talking about?" Perfected hard stare. "You stare at me like I've been condemned and you're waiting for me to repent." 

And the images come: conviction, final blessings, execution. "I was just looking at you."

Disbelief; paranoia has taken its toll. "I don't know what you want from me." Stuttering. "Want from you? When have I asked for anything?" "I know you!" Lies. "I know what you're thinking." No. If they knew what you were thinking, things would be very different. Decides to play along: "All right, then, what do I want?" "The home and the garden and the yard." "And you don't?" Since when? Who was this person? "But you keep expecting me to lead you to it!" "Wrong." "Then what?" "I'm not the brains behind this. I'm going along." "Yes, and that's all you ever do." Acid eats away. "What, you'd like it better if I arranged things?" "You never give me any direction-" "Since when have you followed my directions?" "- so I have to guess at what would keep you happy." A crime. "And no matter what I did, you never were. You still aren't. And I can't stand it!" "How am I expected to be happy, Sydney?" Blasting into Technicolor. The use of names brings it home. "The fact that we've been globe-trotting for seven months? The terrorist missions? The fact that we're fugitives?" She flounders; eyes of Mary Magdalene, the liquid eyes of a repentant sinner. "I never- I never meant for this to happen." 

There are no eleventh hour heroics on his part. He has no valiant courage that can withstand. His self-loathing rises as he goes to comfort her, knowing that he loves her more than anything in the truest sense of the phrase, and it is not healthy.

* * *

In the morning he lies quietly in bed with his eyes closed, feigning sleep while she clicks around in her heels. She needs no alarm and awakes without fail at eight on the dot. They both moan a bit at the idea of her leaving- a habit- and she'll nuzzle into him before throwing the covers off and bounding out of bed. Cold air seeps in every morning. He doesn't complain.

He likes to listen to her- the run of the faucet in the bathroom as she washes her face, the rustle of her clothes as she gets dressed, the clink of jewelry as she selects what to wear, the spritz of Chanel Nº 5 that completes the transformation. She goes out to the kitchen to prepare her coffee and he can hear her movements through the quiet flat. She comes back and sits next to him, leaning over so that her hair brushes his cheek and he can feel the material of her clothes against his arm. She kisses his cheek and murmurs unimportant things, and he focuses on her voice. Carefully, before she leaves, she presses her lips to his gently, so as not to smear her make-up.

Mostly he wanders around the city, in his car or on foot, keeping a low profile. He passes by where she works at least twice daily, nervous at their separation and savoring it just the same.

When she comes home she's bright and cheery and almost herself again, only she's picked up a nasty habit of smoking cigarettes and drinking hard liquor. This, he knows, is her penance. She swallows the acrid smoke and chokes down vodka to make herself pay, corporal punishment. When he takes the cigarette from her hand, she lights another without missing a beat, when he removes a glass from her lax grip she's at the bar before he can return.

The phone calls start in the middle of January, at all hours, late, early, midday, and he is not allowed to answer them. Mostly they are made to the mobile phone of Julia Thorne, but they occasionally jingle the landline. The ones that call the penthouse are the important ones.

Those deserving of that title know who they are. They are not used to not knowing what's going on and they are not used to waiting.

Coming back from the dead, however, is a possibility.

* * *

Those of you who review? I adore you.


	8. 8

8

Simon Walker is not used to having the phone ring twelve times before it is answered, though he cannot possibly know that she- who he thinks is Julia- is, in fact, not even home.

He's sitting in the living room, watching a hockey game on television when she comes home for the day, her briefcase banging against her knee as she struggles with the door. He has learned to tune out the obnoxious ringing of the phone, but she drops the briefcase and slams her knee into the table the phone is on, glaring at him as she answers the phone and starts with a breathless, "Hello?"

It barely registers that the person on the other end is yelling, and when it does, he turns to watch her expression. He finds he cannot place the emotion. "Of course," she says, and her voice trembles in a way that he is certain only he noticed, and she places the phone down on the receiver.

"You have got to get out of here." she says loudly, and she changes the channel on the television and turns it off, picking up his glass and striding to the kitchen. He stares at her, stunned. "Now!" she snaps. "If he comes and finds you we are both dead! Go!"

She is anxious, pulling at his arm to make him move, pleading with her eyes as if the glance alone can soothe the sting of her words. "Who?" he stutters, taking note of her cream-colored sweater and the woolen skirt of gold. The "J" around her neck is twisted.

Pulling him to his feet, she lies, "No one you need to worry about," and she pushes him towards the door, snatching his coat and shoving it towards him. "Just go."

He tries using her given name as leverage. She merely glares.

He thinks on the elevator ride down that maybe he should've asked who it was he had to hide from. He knows once he enters the apartment three hours later that he should have.

There is a fire going in the fire place, and the whole apartment is bathed in a golden glow one wouldn't expect on a February afternoon in London. As the door shuts behind him, he knows he is an intruder.

The murmur of voices in the kitchen cease, and the only noise is the crackle of wood burning. He wonders if they will shoot him as he enters the kitchen.

She is cool and prim and leaning against the counter, no signs of foul play or roughness. He- the one he had run from- is sitting at the kitchen table, his legs stretched out carelessly towards her, slouching comfortably. Smoothly as a waltz they both turn to face him, the trespasser.

He does not like the look on her face- passively dangerous, with a flicker of disgust in her eyes. He can almost hear it, Mommy's not done, go to your room and play. Only he's not supposed to be there. The look the man gives him is feral and possessive. He thinks, oh, dear. He thinks she is his.

This makes him want to indignantly cry out, no, she's _mine_, but she's not, no more than she belongs to the other man, no more than she belongs to anyone. Were you ever mine? He almost asks, but he keeps his mouth shut.

She introduces him as her supplier, the man, he learns, is Simon Walker. He is one of Them. He also seems to consider her his property, after introductions are made he stands up beside her and runs a hand down her side, bringing her to him before crushing her lips to his. Morbidly fascinated, he finds he cannot look away.

When her lips have been soundly bruised, she has the decency to not be able to meet his eyes.

He knows better than to hang around, so he goes to her office to pretend to be earning his keep by playing on the computer. Three games of solitaire later, Simon Walker leaves.

She lays, limp and broken, on their bed, her eyes the vacant stare of the doll she has created: her hand-crafted porcelain features, her lush wardrobe, her dream penthouse, her mindless prince, her frantic, wind-up actions. Her chest rises and falls erratically and her face is tracked with tears.

He remembers, now, how once she was everything that was good and right in the world, the pristine epitome of virtue and every value known to man. Sometimes he thinks it would kill her if he left. Sometimes he knows she wouldn't notice.

She reaches for him weakly, incoherent words tumbling from her lips, the china doll begging to be put back together. The cracked utterance of his name is what breaks his resolve: against his will, he gathers her to him, and she wilts into him. Her swollen lips press fretful, fervent kisses to his face and neck, forgive me for I have sinned, it has been two days since my last confession. When she weakly puts her lips to his she tastes of blood and smoke and vodka and someone else. She inhales his breath, stifling him, taking his life from him to sustain herself, her eyes wide and unseeing and desperate, some gorgeous wild thing that he would die to touch. She has the fingers of a shaman and the birthright of a siren and he wouldn't be surprised if she could suck his life out with her fingertips, suck them dry and leave his shell.

But not now, no, not now. Now she is dry and barren expanse of nothing.

He is her lifeblood and her savior, as he's always been. And he allows this madness to continue because he knows no other way.

* * *

This life is killing him.

* * *

Yeah, I know. I know. Yell at me in comments. I will cower accordingly.


	9. 9

9

* * *

He goes back and forth in his mind, attempting to catalogue the aliases and the locations. She was April in India, and Susie came before that, but where were they? Did they live in the bungalow in Indonesia, or was it on the outskirts of Bombay? Where did he sell his watch? Were they still in Hong Kong? He cannot remember all of her aliases, let alone his, and the places blur. The goats bleating outside their window might've been Calcutta, but it might've been Kerala and why can he only remember the time they spent in India? Where did they go after India? And what were they named? 

When they were in these foreign countries, where their documentations were false and sloppy but no one cared or checked and their names were changed every week without fail and their language was their own; he possessed her, she was his, because she was all he had. She knew this and belonged to him and was happy because she loved him and they lied together and lost themselves together and were the only two in the world that could understand the other. They were poor and happy, eating oranges for dinner and sleeping on a pallet on a dirt floor of a one-room hut in what was essentially a jungle. It was the other people that made for problems, because passerbys he could keep away. Did the problems start in Algeria? He cannot remember. They looked over their shoulders and she held her skirts up- because she wore long skirts then, flowing and so like the natives- but when he would stop and pick her up to whirl her around out of the sheer joy of being she'd throw her head back and laugh instead of looking at him in disgust and pushing him away.

One night, after Syria but before Armenia, he remembers her blissfully trekking through a field to the next town, her hair the closest to her natural color that she'd had in months, and she'd suddenly looked at him and declared that she loved him, point blank, like she'd never said it and he'd never heard it and she'd never loved anyone. He compares that image of her to the one he has now- the sleek, prowling image with bi-monthly hair appointments and lethal but careless wet jobs she was paid extraordinarily for.

The woman he loved (loves?) was the woman she was, the one who told him the whole truth, always, or often enough to fool him. The person she is now omits and lies coolly to his face and clutches at him desperately when he burns himself on the truth. She loves some version of him, maybe the one she remembers from years ago, the one that died when he saw the ashes, or maybe the one that she feels saved her from Hong Kong, or maybe one of the hundreds of men he has become for her. He loved the woman she once was, but he wasn't sure he could do that, love someone for she they used to be, or a portion of that person. Love was the whole thing, right, not bits and pieces. Maybe they were getting it wrong and that is why they are being punished.

One night, he gets feverish from spending too much time in a park while vacating the apartment so as to maintain Julia's cover, and it was Sydney's cool hands that slipped aspirin between his lips and coaxed him to swallow water, that rested on his hot face, Sydney that answered his mumbled questions and soothed his seeking hands. Her visits now were few and far between, and they alternately broke his heart and bolstered his courage. If he could only continue to live between visits he'd be fine.

* * *

He dreams that he is home and his wife is sitting at the kitchen table in the morning. "Darling," she says as he walks towards her wordlessly, desiring her comfort like he had as a child with his mother. He embraces her, surrounded by her scent and her normalcy. She doesn't ask questions as he releases her and sits across from her in a pool of sunshine. She fixes him coffee, making idle chatter, her smooth pale hands stirring his coffee because he never told her he liked it black. She wraps both hands around the mug before she hands it to him, her soft hands warm as she touches his face. She does not condemn him for having left, she is happy he has come home. Her hair is lighter than he remembers. 

She smiles uncertainly over his shoulder when the door opens, a manicured hand coming to her throat as the shadow crosses him. A possessive hand on his shoulder.

"Would you like some coffee?" his wife asks hesitantly.

"No, thank you. He stopped by to say goodbye, didn't you?"

He grips his mug so tightly he fears it might break, gulping the scalding liquid down, hoping to absorb whatever magic his wife has. She can withstand the power standing behind him. She can stand tall and look her in the eye and see her for what she is. He gets chills from feeling her hand on his shoulder.

His wife watches and she leans down and whispers that it's time to go, taking the mug from his hand and putting it down on the table. He stands up, unable to resist. He looks at his wife pleadingly. She steps forward.

There is no competition. The safety of his wife is what he needs, not what he desires. And so he leaves the kitchen, the coffee and the wife and the sunlight of security to live within this shadow of his captor.

He wakes up next to her and prays without words.

* * *

He will escape, he decides, thinking coldly with the rational side of his mind. He will not be her poetic justice, nor will she be his: the man who survived death twice over drowning amongst the living; his committing suicide by killing her, his life. 

He once promised some higher power that he would sacrifice anything to have her back, anything for her to be alive and well and with him. He did not realize that fate was so literal. He had promised anything, they had chosen his life, and here he was sacrificing it.

No more. When she came home from the hair appointment or the job she had, he'd tell her. He'd find the strength the leave. And he would not come back.

He has no illusions: leaving her will kill him. It is the matter of his death that bothers him- he is not long for this world no matter what he does. He does not expect justice or fairness or relief, he expects things to end. His greatest joy and his greatest torment is her.

He has just finished rationalizing his resolution to leave when she opens the door and runs into the house, her hair mussed and blood trickling out of her mouth. She cries with her mouth open, her face wet with tears, and she comes at him desperately, attempting to throw her arms around him.

He pushes her away. She steps back, stunned. "Vaughn," she says unsteadily, the shock bringing her a step closer to sanity, "Vaughn- they know."

"Know what?" He will calm her. He will get her settled, complacent, and then he will leave.

"They know who I am. They know my name, they know who you are- we need to leave."

She comes closer, invades him, her hands on his face, steadying him. "They're coming for me, Vaughn, not for you. You must go. They won't look for you, they only want me- you need to go."

And, heaven help him, he thinks quickly that she has given him his freedom.

And in that same instant he knows he'd never take it.

"No- Sydney-" And they are gripping and pushing and crying and it does no good because neither will run. Somewhere along the line their self-preservation screw has fallen loose and now it's too far gone.

They enter quickly, the men with the guns, and quietly, which is strange because he expects a lot of noise and violence. She stands tall, regal in spite of her appearance and demands the name of their employer. They give her the respect she deserves, their tone and inflection properly subdued, her name preceded by a "Miss". Their phrases are punctuated by the guns they point regretfully at her. He is a non-entity.

She is dangerous and suddenly Sydney. She starts questioning them, too many questions. They grow impatient, their words clipping shorter and shorter, her name spat out distastefully. They do not want to force her. They, too, want her body to remain unbruised. They think she acts this way because she's a pistol. He knows she's trying to distract them from him.

Calling attention to himself serves no purpose. He knows this. He is once again helpless in a situation of someone else's design. He hates being a pawn.

They cock their guns, readying to shoot. They offer her once last time to cooperate. She smiles sweetly and declines. They aim.

He lunges.

Checkmate.

There is an explosion, and, true to form, there is an onslaught of images behind his eyes. He blinks them aside, lingering on memory of her dancing in the rain in Indonesia, choosing instead to look into her eyes, she who has disabled the men who did this to him, their bodies limp on the ground. Her mouth drips blood. He tastes it.

He always imagined that he would have something profound to say as his final words- something memorable, prophetic, poetic. But there are no words in this moment, not with her hands weakly stroking his face, blood in both of their mouths. This is what it is like to be lost.

There is only the single prayer he can remember.

"Sydney."

* * *

The end.

* * *

This is the final section of 'perdition'- something that needed to be written. Love it, hate it, laughed it? Let me know. Thanks for coming along for the ride. 


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